If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

AMD Athlon's R3 Graphics: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

04-15-2014, 12:50 PM

Phoronix: AMD Athlon's R3 Graphics: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

For the past week now we have been extensively benchmarking AMD's new AM1 APUs with all the current models available to the public: the Sempron 2650 / 3850 and Athlon 5150 / 5350. All of our testing up to this point has been using an updated Linux kernel and Mesa for the open-source Linux graphics driver experience with these APU Radeon R3 Graphics. Today, we're looking at the performance of the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver in multiple configurations compared to the proprietary Catalyst Linux driver.

Can we have a frame latency test or two? 2D benchmarks? That's what really matters when comparing Catalyst to RadeonSI/CI drivers since my Kabini APU laptop, which is essentially the same SoC as these APUs, has very sluggish desktop performance with Catalyst + Ubuntu 14.04, but with the open source drivers + kernel 3.14, the desktop and videos are smooth.

Comment

Can we have a frame latency test or two? 2D benchmarks? That's what really matters when comparing Catalyst to RadeonSI/CI drivers since my Kabini APU laptop, which is essentially the same SoC as these APUs, has very sluggish desktop performance with Catalyst + Ubuntu 14.04, but with the open source drivers + kernel 3.14, the desktop and videos are smooth.

Frame latency graphs are on a few of the results... 2D benchmarks will likely come in their own separate article.

Comment

Summary.
Open drivers when running latest kernel mesa is 2-3 times faster than Ubuntu 14.04 stock.
The latest open driver stack performed within 20% to 80% of Catalyst on 3D benchmarks.
There were performance gains both from a newer kernel and from using the latest mesa.
Micheal is planning to run some 2d tests on the same hardware.

Opinion:
As always, I'm impressed by the rate that the open drivers progress at, but it is obvious that for 3D tasks, this hardware's driver needs some more work.

Comment

DRI3 support isn't enabled for these cards both in Mesa and in the radeon DDX, so that's strange.

I've made myself some benchmarks with my radeonsi card (hd7730m), and for unigine heave 4.0,
I got last year a score of 234 (9.3 fps) with Catalyst.
Now with recent Mesa and kernel 3.13, I get a score of 200, which is very close.

Comment

Isn't 1080p high enough resolution where hyperz we would make a difference?

Also, does anyone know what the gpumark tests triangles and pixbuf piano actually do?
The former sounds like it is just creating a bunch of triangles, which, if done in the worst way, would seem to be a good indicator of how fast each driver can issue instructions. That might provide some kind of useful info into driver efficiency?

Comment

Isn't 1080p high enough resolution where hyperz we would make a difference?

Also, does anyone know what the gpumark tests triangles and pixbuf piano actually do?
The former sounds like it is just creating a bunch of triangles, which, if done in the worst way, would seem to be a good indicator of how fast each driver can issue instructions. That might provide some kind of useful info into driver efficiency?

Dungeon showed massive performance boosts for hyperz at 1080p resolution. It makes a big difference on bandwidth limited platforms like this. Even at the lower resolutions i think it was 5-10%, which is a decent chunk of some of these results. Some of the memory optimizations in 3.15 and that curaga looked at could make a big difference on those tests that show 3 fps instead of 5 fps.

I believe triangle ends up the same as glxgears, which last i heard is basically limited by the latency rate of X commands in the DRI2 drivers, because it has a synchronous X command that blocks everything until it returns each time. DRI3 makes the call async which should speed it way up, comparable to the proprietary drivers. But i haven't actually seen any test results to confirm that.